No Dog's Thank's

We climbed the Fairy Knowe, a hill on which people leave messages, trinkets and bits of cloth for fairies (it’s a strange story). The place has a slight Blair Witch Project feel to it. I’ve uploaded a few photos from the walk so you can see for yourself.

The title of this blog comes from a sign in the main car park at Aberfoyle, and is quite possibly the worst apostrophe crime I’ve ever seen, and I am struggling to get my head around what sentence might include no dog’s thank’s.

Of course, no dog’s thanks is easy – that would refer to the thanks that is given by no dog – eg “no dog’s thanks was forthcoming, despite the huge delivery from the Bonio people”. But no dog’s thank’s defies grammatically correct usage, as far as I can think. Any ideas?

5 thoughts on “No Dog's Thank's”

Maybe the person who wrote the sign is a Pacific Islander called “Thank’s”. Those guys have all sorts of crazy grammar in their names. This would mean that the sign was the equivalent of “NO DOG’S. JUSTIN.”. That still begs the question: no dog’s what?

That’s a good hypothesis, Justin. Maybe Thank’s’s grasp of English was not too good, and he thought that by simply indicating possession, he was covering all bases and barring dogs from bringing anything of their own onto the grass – so dogs are fine, but absolutely anything belonging to the dogs is not, hence simply no dog’s.

I’ve just realised that another possibility might be that there is something belonging to the thanks. For instance, one might doubt the authenticity of the thanks of a dog – but even then that would be the dog’s thanks’ authenticity was in doubt and not the dog’s thank’s. And thanks as a noun/concept doesn’t really have a singular form (eg give him my thank).

And “No Dog’s thank’s” is the middle of a sentence. No Dog is is the name of 19th century philosopher, and his “thank” is a thought which remembered having long ago. I suspect the full sentence is “No Dog’s thank’s completely irrelevent in this theological context. I’m thinking that Yes Bob’s theory’s the one we should be applying in this metaphysical situation.”

Obviously, they should have used “thank is, and theory is” but they were already short on sign space.